First English translation of key chronicle for study of the rise of the Normans. This is the first English translation of a powerful work of semi-imaginary history which gave the Normans a past, present, and future at the outset of their triumphant century. Completed in or soon after 1015 by a visiting Frenchscholar, it is a study in verse and prose of one family's rise from defeat and exile in the world of the heathen Vikings to an honoured place among the great territorial rulers of France. It recounts two campaigns in England by the founder, Rollo, and a series of stirring political, military and religious events on the Continent, most notably the dreadful murder of Rollo's son William, and the kidnapping, escape and precarious early career of Dudo's firstpatron, Count Richard I. The author's exuberant imagination is matched by his language, so presenting the unwary reader with difficulties, which ERIC CHRISTIANSEN notes and discusses throughout, defining and explaining themany poetic metres and prose embellishments used, and identifying the sources of numerous borrowings; he also re-examines and collates the manuscripts and printed versions of the text, and considers the most recent scholarship inthe field. The late ERIC CHRISTIANSEN was Fellow of New College and University Lecturer at Oxford.

Inspired by the Pope's call for a Holy War, Scandinavian rulers and German military monks conquered and settled Finland, Estonia and Prussia, before turning on the eastern empires of Orthodox Novgorod and pagan Lithuania. These 'Northern Crusades' are less celebrated than those in the Middle East, but they were also far more successful. Vast new territories became and remain Christian, while the central institutions of medieval Western Europe - churches, castles, manors, guilds, parliaments and feudal law codes - were introduced into a dark and inhospitable outer world. Now newly revised in the light of the recent developments in Baltic and Northern medieval research, this authoritative overview provides a balanced and compelling account of a tumultuous era.